Review: The Migration Project

by Jane

For the last six months, theatre maker Alirio Zavarce has been an Artist in Residence at William Light R-12 School and Woodville High School. This residency has cumulated in The Migration Project in the 2013 Come Out Festival.

Arriving at the Torrens Parade Ground, we are each passed a migration card. It asks for our name, our date of birth, our method of arrival. Then the questions get stranger: are you blonde? A real blonde? What is better – lamingtons or pavlova? Would you be prepared to eat a whole jar of Vegemite to prove how Australian you are? Are you secretly racist?

We fill these in while waiting in line, and at the end stands Alirio Zavarce, asking each of us “What makes you Australian?” We again line up, this time in five queues, as we wait for the rest of the audience to be processed.

We are directed into the next room, dropping our migration cards on a table on our way in. The room is filled with circles of chairs, and in each circle is a student from one of the two high schools. We small talk: where in the world have you been? What hobbies do you have? They tell us a bit about themselves, where they’re from, and how we’re all a part of this big wide world together.

We move again, this time into an end-on theatre set-up. The high school students take their places on the stage, and the performance truly begins. Introduced and lead by Zavarce, the students tell us their stories of how they came to Australia, or how their families came here. They write words to describe Australia on blackboards, they pull props to tell their stories out of suitcases. Intercut through this are videos of other students talking about the world they live in: what makes them Australian? How does racism make them feel?

The Migration Project feels of the same central philosophy of Zavarce’s lauded Sons & Mothers: Zavarce taking an instance in his life – there his relationship with his mother, here his migration to Australia – and using it to instigate a collaborative community work. Where Zavarce created a space for the men of Sons & Mothers to truly own the work, though, that same space doesn’t feel like it is offered to the young adults at the heart of The Migration Project. Their stories are slotted into the work, but the work is never of their stories. In the end, we are left with just a cursory glance.

The piece is quite nice: we see some students telling their stories, and they do a lovely job of this. But in the subject matter – and in the students – it feels like there is so much more potential.

Of course, the driving force behind this work is all of the work Zavarce did that we as the audience members weren’t privy too. It’s the time in the schools, working with these teenagers, asking them for their perspectives on the world and their personal histories. How this process happened and what workshopping he did with the students isn’t detailed to the audience in performance or in program notes, but stemming from an Artist in Residency program in these schools you feel that The Migration Project is about the creation process for a work of theatre, and not the theatre itself.

From not seeing this process, unanswered questions come up: how was this group of performers chosen out of all of the workshop participants? How was the work constructed? For a show about the diversity of Australians, why were there no Indigenous performers? Why do we hear about where these young people came from, but so little about where they are and where they’re going?

Much of the work gives the impression of coming from Zavarce, and not from collaboration with the students. In particular, a supercut of Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard quotes to the tone of “stop the boats” feels awkwardly siphoned in and isn’t given enough political or social context, assuming that the audience is very politically engaged. This strand is then dropped, never to be picked up on again.

The show is slightly marred in other ways too: the image and sound in the projection were not always synced up, making it hard for our brains to process the words and their meaning. The work has very little carry through: the conversations we had in the second room are forgotten, the migration cards are never mentioned again and still sit discarded as we make our way out. Through the loss of themes, the work stagnates.

Ultimately, the work doesn’t take us anywhere. Even in the final moments, meant to be a symbol of coming together and ambition, the cord progression of the piano doesn’t elevate the audience to that same place.

We are introduced to some lovely young adults, and hear a little about them and their stories. They give earnest performances, and you feel the importance of them having the opportunity to publicly perform. The work ends on a note of hope for the leaders of our society and our country as these young people grow up. But the work itself lacks sustenance and we’re left to think about the untold parts of the stories, rather than the stories we were told.

AJZ Productions in association with The Migration Museum, Charles Sturt Council and Come Out Festival presents The Migration Project. Creative team: Alirio Zavarce (director, writer, performer and creator), Bradly Williams (projections, assistant creative), Fazz Farrell (camera operator), Alia Guidance (designer), Dush Kumar (production manager, light and sound technician). With performers from William Light R-12 School and Woodville High School. At the Parade Grounds until May 24, then at Woodville Town Hall from May 29 to June 2. More information and tickets.

Because of the process that created it, this work was a hard one to write about: how do you write about a work where it feels you couldn’t see the truly important parts of the puzzle? In this, I took reference to Lyn Gardner writing in the Guardian:

In the end, if the project has a theatrical manifestation – if an audience is invited and critics too – then it has to be judged on the basis of the performance. To take any other approach is to patronise all those who have participated in its making, whether they be professional or community participants. Audiences don’t want to leave saying: “Oh that was great – for a community show.” We want to leave filled with delight and enthusiasm, having witnessed a great piece of theatre.

2 Comments to “Review: The Migration Project”

The Migration Project is a Community Cultural Development Project, the participants are school students from diverse cultural backgrounds some of them from a refugee and asylum seeking background and I am absolutely proud of all of them and their performance.

They performed for the first time ever and I think they are an amazing group of young people that have worked really hard and told their own stories in their own words

Now I don’t feel I need to explain that, as a reviewer I feel you should realize that.

You closed and justify your review with a quote form Lynn Gardner in the guardian:

“In the end, if the project has a theatrical manifestation – if an audience is invited and critics too – then it has to be judged on the basis of the performance. To take any other approach is to patronise all those who have participated in its making, whether they be professional or community participants. Audiences don’t want to leave saying: “Oh that was great – for a community show.” We want to leave filled with delight and enthusiasm, having witnessed a great piece of theatre.”

Yet on the basis of “ it has to be judged on the basis of the performance” I find your expectations, comparisons with my previous work and stated unfulfilled process curiosity problematic in order to have had an objective appraisal of the work and actually respond to the performance on the basis of the performance.

If as a writer and reviewer you wanted more information you could have simply ask or do more research.

As an Arts worker I want you to respond to “The Migration Project” for what the work actually is: A CCD project, working with young people and only one of two theatre projects in the festival for young people actually created by young people. It is our responsibility to help young people take the first steps in the arts and not to crush voices that are already marginalised, unheard and misunderstood.

I ask you to please go to private schools around Adelaide and apply the same rigour of reviewing as you have to The Migration Project. Perhaps even ask what the schools that have come to the performance are getting out of the experience?

I gladly accept all the blame for any theatrical offence that the work have caused to your reviewer palate but the work has a very a clear and simple message. This is to facilitate a conversation from young people to young people; all it tries to achieve is to create harmony, understanding and peace.

The Tony / Julia piece does not happen in isolation and I am very surprised you didn’t see the link or cannot follow the order of events in the show that I think are painfully obvious given that just before it the students performed a piece imagining what it would be like to have to have your country destroyed and then be forced to leave in a boat and a toy boat then being placed in the centre of the space as the Tony/Julia piece is projected. Do I really have to explain that?

Lastly if you just think for a second about the absurdity of the migration laws over the years the white Australia policy, the backs and forth’s and the hopelessness of the way we treat asylum seekers then you may understand why the migration cards are left discarded for all to view at the end of the performance.

In our contemporary world where 1 in 5 Australians have experience racism I don’t feel I need to explain to you the necessity to create understanding and why I felt compelled to create this piece.

I agree with you that these students did a great job of performing. They should be proud of themselves, and you should be proud of them.

On to your points: I don’t know how I as a critic am supposed to see this work in isolation to your previous works. I feel, and you’re free to disagree, that I did respond to this show as a CCD project, but I responded as an invited critic, taking my place alongside the paying audience. It would have been fine to have not invited me, or to have invited me with the request not to review. I thought hard about this review and about if I should publish it, but yes, in the end, I was thinking about Gardner’s piece and the need to appraise public work on public terms.

I’m sorry that you feel that I am crushing voices – that is sincerely not the intent of this review. I think of course works on these themes should be made, and that these discussions need to happen. What I am saying in the review is that to me it felt like their voices were not heard enough over yours.

I would have loved to have known how school’s were responding to the work, and I expressed my dismay to my date at the end of the evening that I had not seen the piece in a school’s performance. That is a lesson for my own practice for next time.